Tuesday, 12 November 2013

On Saturday, the 26th of October the
Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic participated in the University of
Cambridge's Festival of Ideas, an event held annually since 2008 designed to
encourage the community and anyone with an interest in Cambridge’s work and
research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, to come over, check us
out and meet the faculty and students.

Several
events were held within our department on the Saturday, with two well-attended
lectures by faculty members Dr Richard Dance and Prof Simon Keynes, speaking on
‘Frontiers in Anglo-Saxon England’, on the Tuesday following.The majority of Saturday's events, organized
under the theme ‘Beyond Borders: Exploring the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic
Worlds’, were run by graduate students, led by Christine Voth.Upstairs in the department itself, attendees
could enjoy a re-enactment of Groenlendinga saga, have a look at the work being
carried out by the Orkney Project, or, for the young (and young at heart),
there was a colouring session where future ASNCs were invited to hone their
artistic skills with a variety of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic art, or to try
their hand at the runic and Ogham scripts.

Downstairs
we were happy to present two brief lectures.The first was a discussion of the Otherworld in Celtic mythology and
literature, including a dramatic retelling, in English and Welsh, of a tale
from the Mabinogion, a celebrated collection of Medieval Welsh prose
texts.The second lecture was an
exploration and appreciation of the importance of borders and marginalia in a
selection of medieval manuscripts originating from each of the cultures covered
by our research.

Running
concurrently with the lectures was a poster session, encompassing a wide
variety of topics within the fields covered by ASNC, where attendees of the
Festival were welcome to browse at their leisure.Use of the English Faculty Library’s iPad,
generously loaned for the occasion, to explore high-resolution digital images
of manuscripts was a popular feature of this session, and was helpful in
demonstrating the increasing value of new technology in the study of medieval
artifacts.

It’s
not every day that we get to share our enthusiasm in our research with the
general public, so we hope to see the Festival of Ideas continue to celebrate
the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for many years to come!

Wednesday, 6 November 2013

On Monday 28th October ASNaC was treated to a visit by Immo Warntjes, Lecturer in Irish Medieval History at Queen’s University, Belfast. Immo
originally worked as a postgraduate researcher in the Foundations of
Irish Culture Project at the National University of Ireland, Galway,
where he also completed his Ph.D. under Professor
Dáibhí Ó Cróinín in 2007. Immo’s primary field of interest is early medieval scientific
thought but he is probably best known for his work in the field of
computus (medieval time-reckoning). His PhD thesis later became his
monograph and is published as The Munich Computus: Text &
Translation. Irish computistics between Isidore of Seville and the
Venerable Bede and its reception in Carolingian times (Stuttgart:
Steiner 2010). In addition to this work, Immo has also been extensively
involved with the International Conference on the Science of Computus
which happens every two years in Galway (next one in 2014)

Immo
kindly spent last Monday in the department where he met with members of
staff and graduate students and his day culminated in a paper for the
ASNC graduate seminar entitled 'Willibrord the computist: harbinger of
the Carolingian renaissance?'. The paper provided significant food for
thought and argued quite convincingly that the 7th century
missionary saint Willibrord had a much more far reaching influence on
the study and application of medieval European computistics than had
previously been thought.

There
are a number of ASNC post-graduate students who are either working
directly in the field of medieval computus or in fields that are allied
to it. Computus is an area that is under-researched and there is a
general dearth of workshops, courses and scholarly material outside of
original manuscript sources. It was therefore very kind of Immo to run a
two hour computus workshop on the Monday morning (thoughtfully arranged
by Dr Rosalind Love) and this was well attended by some twenty students
from the faculty. During the workshop Immo discussed the ‘Easter
Controversy’ which had occupied the thoughts and minds of the early
church fathers and is something that, even today, gives rise to
disagreement. Immo also discussed the basis for the calculation of the
date of Easter and the differences between Roman and Celtic
computistical methods. Latin terminology and manuscript evidence was
presented along with relevant historical background. The workshop was
extremely enjoyable and highly interactive with lots of opportunities
for students to participate. Immo introduced the various types of Easter
tables (Celtic and Roman) focusing on differences with interpretation
and calculation in a session which was highly informative and provided a
significant amount of useful information. Immo came to medieval
studies with a background in mathematics and he has an impressive amount
of experience in the area of computistics. His delivery and content was
both clear and concise as well as engaging, incisive, and directly
relevant to graduate study.

After
the workshop a number of ASNC graduates agreed together that a
‘self-help’ workshop focused on working through and interpreting
computistical tables would be an extremely useful extension to Immo’s
session and something along these lines will be arranged separately. If
you would be interested in attending and/or contributing to such a
workshop please ask to be added to Tony Harris’s Facebook group on
Medieval Computus.

Tuesday, 15 October 2013

At least four current and former ASNCs have squared up to Jeremy Paxman on the current series of University Challenge. In the episode broadcast on Monday 14th October, recent ASNC graduates Owain Jones and Daisy Le Helloco helped Bangor defeat Aberystwyth. Their victory, together with Paxman's entertainingly inconsitent pronunciation of Aberystwyth, can be seen on BBC i-Player here until Monday 21st October.

Charter for ten?

Meanwhile, back in August, ASNC second-year Rachael Gregory helped Queens' College to a close-fought victory over Durham. The final score was 190-170. Congratulations, Rachael! A few weeks later, Lizzie Colwill, another second-year, gave a fine performance for Pembroke against Somerville College, Oxford. We are very proud of both of them.

Thursday, 3 October 2013

The
sun was out in Dublin last week, as were a good number of Celticists hoping to
enlighten or be enlightened on the subject of Genre in Medieval Celtic
Literature.The School of Celtic Studies
at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies hosted the colloquium, organized
by doctoral student Nicole Volmering. The aim of the conference was to open a
dialogue about the role of genre, both within modern scholarship in the field
and within the minds of medieval authors and editors.The need for such a discussion was evidenced
by the terrific turnout at the conference, with a crowd composed of both new
and very familiar faces alike.

Proceedings
began on Friday afternoon, with the first session on cycles and cyclification
in Irish literature, specifically in the Fenian lays and in Acallam Bec (‘The
Little Colloquy’).The papers provided a
good start to a good conference, but in retrospect perhaps they should have
been split, with one paper in the last session, to bring the whole thing
full-circle...The half-day was rounded
out with an analysis of the sub-genre of tecosc (‘teaching’) and its
relation to kingship, and a consideration of the role of women in both saints
lives and epic narrative.Feasting as
befits Celtic scholars of course concluded the first day’s festivities.

Saturday
presented a full day of papers, four sessions worth in fact.Continuing on from Friday’s theme, three out
of the four were focused on further Irish material.Concerning aspects of modern scholarship, we
heard about editing practices and the theory and application of genre
methodology onto medieval texts.In
other papers, we were asked to put ourselves into the place of medieval
scribes, to question how they were organizing and categorizing their texts, or
into the minds of medieval readers, to consider how they were processing them.

This'll be worth a few bob one day: conference programme signed by the likes of Fergus Kelly, Liam Breatnach, Greg Toner, David Stifter, David Dumville, Jenny Rowland, Lizzie Boyle, Barry Lewis, David Callander and Geraldine Parsons (a few ASNCs past and present in there...)

The
first session on Saturday, however, was concerned with Welsh material, and I am
glad to have been a part of it.Our own
ASNC David Callander began the morning with a discussion of narrative verse as
a medieval Welsh literary genre.In his
paper, David asked us to reconsider the traditional view that medieval Welsh
verse is non-narrative and, having made the argument for narrative verse in
Welsh, considered the implications for how the verse might then be regrouped
for a discussion of genre.This
conclusion provided a nice segue into my own paper, where I dealt with issues
that have been present in the definition of ymddiddanau or dialogue
poems as a genre.I sought to clarify
the genre by refining the definition, and in doing so also to highlight the
potential danger of trying to explain inconsistencies in the texts in a way not
supported by their manuscript context.Barry Lewis, former ASNC and present researcher at the Centre for
Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (who will be giving a lecture at the Graduate
Seminar on 25 November – mark your calendars!), concluded our session by
reminding us about the importance of analyzing the categories into which we put
medieval texts.He addressed the factors
that modern editors consider in distinguishing between religious and secular
verse, and argued that such distinctions would not necessarily have been made
by the medieval people who were dealing with these texts.

Questioning
the validity of our modern editing practices is indeed a topic that ran through
a number of papers, and was perhaps one of the most important issues to take a
away from the conference for further thought.Though the matter of genre can certainly stand to further discussion and
debate, the colloquium was productive for raising the profile of the
topic.Hopefully in time we will begin
to see an expansion of critical thinking on the matter of genre in medieval
Celtic literature.

And there's always time for a visit to the National Museum of Ireland. Pictured is the Ardagh Chalice, possibly eighth century, from Co. Limerick.

Tuesday, 24 September 2013

The ‘Converting the
Isles’ Research Network held its fifth and final colloquium in Cambridge on
September 19–21.The theme of ‘The Isles
and the Wider World’ was fitting, as we sought to situate our findings on
Insular conversion in a broader geographical, chronological and disciplinary
context and to look forward to new directions for future research.That said, the work of the Network is far
from finished.Two edited volumes are
well under way.These will incorporate
material from not only the colloquia, but also the special lectures and Leeds
IMC sessions sponsored by the Network. Together with the website, these volumes
will represent the most visible legacy of the Network.

Another part of the
Network’s legacy is less tangible, but certainly no less valuable.The ‘Converting the Isles’ colloquia were
designed to facilitate discussion between scholars who work in adjacent but not
always intersecting fields.This has led
to productive conversations and new collaborations that will advance the
discipline in years to come.

‘The Isles and the
Wider World’ left many of us inspired by new questions as well as new answers. The
Right Honourable Rowan Williams opened the colloquium by posing the question of
what we, and medieval writers like Bede, actually understand by
‘conversion’.Chris Wickham’s keynote
lecture then articulated especially well the complexities inherent in the
subject and the advantages and potential pitfalls of a comparative approach.

The second keynote
lecture, by Jean-Michel Picard and Sébastien Bully, used recent archaeological
discoveries at Luxeuil and Annegray to question the reliability of hagiography
and illuminate literary tropes. The other ten speakers presented papers which
ranged widely across the conceptual and historical phenomenon of conversion:
from converts from Islam to Christianity through to anthropological
considerations of religious conversion in the modern world; and from liturgical
and literary witnesses to conversion in early medieval northern Europe, to
archaeological traces of paganism in southwest Germany.

A full programme
remains available on the Network’s website (http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/conversion/),
where podcasts of papers from the conference are now accessible, along with
podcasts from past colloquia and other resources for the study of conversion
which will continue to be developed and updated. News about forthcoming and
past events can be found on our homepage.Please do get in touch with Brittany Schorn (bs321@cam.ac.uk), Roy
Flecher (roy.flechner@ucd.ie) or Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (mnm21@cam.ac.uk) with any
questions, comments or suggestions for the website or if you wish to be added
to our mailing list.

Wednesday, 7 August 2013

Dutch graffiti artist, Niels Meulman, has produced art inspired by the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Old Irish poem Pangur Bán, which will be on display in the north of England until the end of September. The BBC cover the story here.

Professor Paul Russell, of the ASNC Department, has inspected and approved the rebound medieval Welsh law manuscript recently purchased by the National Library of Wales. You can read more on the NLW blog, and BBC News recently published an article about it on their website.

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Dr Caroline Brett writes:At the University of Sydney’s Eighth Australian
Conference of Celtic Studies on 11-14 June 2013, Dr Lynette Olson organised a
special colloquy on the First Life of St Samson of Dol. The aim was to assess what progress has been
made in recent years in understanding this key text for early medieval British
and Breton ecclesiastical history, and whether it can be taken any
further.The answer to the second was a
resounding yes, although not all the delegates agreed on the detail!

The First Life of St Samson of Dol is potentially a
key source for early medieval British (and Irish) Christianity and the politics
of early Brittany. Ostensibly the
biography of a monastic founder and bishop from south-east Wales who ended his
life at Dol in Brittany some time in the second half of the sixth century, it
has aroused controversy among scholars for more than a hundred years. The problems turn on the date of the text’s
composition, on the reality or otherwise of an earlier biography which the
author of the existing text claims to have used, and on the relationship
between this existing biography and its putative model. Various dates between the early seventh
century and ca.850 have been proposed
for the existing text, and the model or Vita
primigenia has been characterised as everything from an eye-witness account
by a relative of the saint, to a literary figment of a ninth-century
propagandist’s imagination. The
arguments seemed to have reached an impasse by the time the full range of them
was presented in Joseph-Claude Poulin’s encyclopaedic Hagiographie bretonne in 2009.
However, the debate has been potentially re-animated by Richard Sowerby
in an article in Francia, 2011, in
which he suggested new grounds for distinguishing between the successive
authors’ contributions, and put in a powerful argument for a date around 700.

Dr Lynette Olson saw this as an opportunity for a
renewed attempt to make some solid progress on the understanding of Vita Prima Samsonis, and invited a group
of Samson scholars, or ‘Samsonites’, to the University of Sydney to offer their
responses to Sowerby’s article and their thoughts on various aspects of the
text. The original line-up of Samsonites
included, in alphabetical order, Caroline Brett, Karen Jankulak, Constant Mews,
Lynette Olson, Joseph-Claude Poulin, Richard Sowerby, Ian Wood and Jonathan
Wooding. Unfortunately Ian Wood and
Richard Sowerby were eventually unable to attend, but it is hoped that their contributions
will be included in the published conference proceedings. Karen Jankulak too was unable to attend, but
her paper was brought and read by Jonathan Wooding.

For the five remaining contributors the upshot was a
highly stimulating two days in which we went ‘head to head’ with St Samson and
discovered ... if not a final solution to our problems, nevertheless a feeling
that, as Wooding memorably put it, ‘our history is moving in the direction of
our text’ and that the potential exists to put Vita Prima Samsonis at the centre of early Insular Christianity.

Thursday, 20 June 2013

Dr Brittany Schorn has been appointed Research Associate on the Interpreting Eddic Poetry project at St John's College Research Centre, University of Oxford, from 1st October 2013.

Dr Elizabeth Boyle has been appointed Lecturer in Early Irish at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, from 1st September 2013.

And, in the recent round of senior academic promotions, Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe and Dr Fiona Edmonds have been appointed to a Readership and a Senior Lectureship respectively, in the Department of ASNC.

Saturday, 8 June 2013

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, ASNC alumna and recent PhD graduate, now at the University of Oxford, who has recently been announced as one of Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers. This initiative, run in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will allow Eleanor to bring her research on the worldview of the medieval Icelanders to a wider audience.

Congratulations also to Dr Philip Dunshea, a PhD graduate of ASNC, who studied as an undergraduate with Dr Alex Woolf at the University of St Andrews, and who has recently been appointed to a temporary lectureship in Celtic History here in the Department of ASNC. Phil will be covering the teaching of Dr Fiona Edmonds, while she is on maternity leave (congratulations Fiona!).

And finally, while we wouldn't normally allow commercial advertising here on the ASNC blog, we must make a brief mention of recent ASNC alumnus, George Potts, who stars in a new advert for Virgin trains. We'll try to resist the urge to make a joke about ASNCs going far ...

Saturday, 1 June 2013

Sir Frank Stenton
was professor of history at the University of Reading, and a leading scholar of
Anglo-Saxon history in the twentieth century. He is best known as the author of
Anglo-Saxon England, still widely regarded as the leading survey of the
subject. Stenton possessed an abiding interest in the conjunctures between
Anglo-Saxon history and numismatics, and served as founding chairman of the
British Academy's Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles committee (1956–66).

On 28 April 1958, Stenton addressed the British Numismatic Society
on the points of contact between numismatics and history in the study of
Anglo-Saxon England. Dr Stewart Lyon made a recording of this lecture
(approximately 75 minutes in length), which has now been digitized and made
available as an MP3 on the British Numismatic Society’s website.
An annotated text adapted from this recording is included in a posthumous
collection of Stenton’s papers, Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England: Being
the Collected Papers of Frank Merry Stenton, edited by Doris Mary Stenton
(Oxford, 1970), pp. 371–82.

Tuesday, 21 May 2013

From April 14 to April 20, Kirkwall hosted the field
school of The Orkney Viking Heritage Project. Eight current (and three former)
members of the ASNC Department travelled to Orkney together with fellow students and
colleagues from the universities of the Highlands and Islands, Oxford,
Nottingham, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff, York and Kings College London. The Orkney Viking Heritage Project is an
AHRC-funded interdisciplinary training programme. It brings together scholars
and heritage professionals to explore the literature, history and material
culture of Viking Orkney and provide hands-on experience of a heritage
landscape.

[photo
credit: Nicola Lugosch]

During the course of the week, we saw
viking grafitti on neolithic monuments at the Ring of Brodgar and the
spectacular burial chamber of Maeshowe, and visited the ruin of St Magnus Kirk
on the small island of Egilsay where Earl Magnús
was killed, along with the imposing St Magnus Cathedral, which St Rögnvaldr
established on the Mainland.

[St Magnus Kirk, photo credit: Bernadette McCooey]

Through presentations, discussions and
excursions, we reconsidered medieval texts and artefacts in situ in order to contextualise our understanding of the past within
the reality of the physical landscape. With the help of local academics,
heritage professionals and Orkney residents, we also explored how this past,
and modern perceptions of it, continue to inform the way current islanders
define and relate to the landscape around them.

Tuesday, 30 April 2013

The evening of Friday 26 April marked the high point and
conclusion (at least of the Cambridge part) of Dr Debbie Potts' project ‘Modern
Poets on Viking Poetry’. Members of the department and the public gathered in
the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio to listen to eleven pieces written by poets
from a variety of backgrounds and ages. They had all been working with skaldic
verses, composed between the 10th and 14th century, and translated for the
project by scholars of Old Norse. Debbie Potts introduced each of the original
verses, which were then beautifully read by Orri Tómasson, transporting emotion
across centuries and languages (as one of the poets remarked).

Some of the poems we heard were translations of, some
reactions to, and some inspired by the form or content of the original skaldic
verse. Especially topical was Lucy Hamiton's ‘Ring of Brodgar’, a response to a
lausavísa by Þjóðólfr Arnórsson – a number of members of the department have
visited this sight only ten days ago. Rebecca Perry's interesting, feminist
interpretation of ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, which she entitled ‘how the earth
increases’, fitted in very well with this week's CUSU Women's Campaign's ‘I
need feminism because...’ photos. Anna Robinson's translation of Kormákr
Ögmundarson's verses turned them into dialogue between the poet and Steingerðr,
the object of his desire, now herself transformed into a subject. Probably the
most emotionally charged compositions of the evening were the poems after Egill
Skallagrímsson's ‘Sonatorrek’ which framed the interval. Chrissy William's ‘The
Bear of the Moon’ beautifully caught the immense grief of the original, while
at the same time contrasting it with dense poetic language. The film poem
‘Sonatorrek’ by Alastair Cook, featuring ‘The Lost Boy’ by John Glenday,
transposed the metre and imagery of the original to the pointless deaths of
World War I, commemorating Glenday's uncle who died in November 1918. It can be
watched on the project's website.

All poems were incredibly powerful and inspired pieces of
art, taking a lost poetic tradition and transforming it into something new,
translating it into our time while also keeping the beauty of the old. Not only
did the project offer an opportunity for creative dialogue between poets and
scholars. The evening also sparked several new ideas for projects among the
graduate students of the department, and we hope that we will hear more of them
in the coming months.

Wednesday, 24 April 2013

The
‘Converting the Isles Network’, based in the Department and supported by the
Leverhulme Trust, held its fourth colloquium on the 22nd and 23rd
of March at Bangor University. Despite
somewhat hazardous travel conditions due to an unexpected freeze, all
participants managed to make it to what turned out to be an extremely
productive gathering. The subject,
‘Coverting the Landscape’, was considered from the perspective of different
regions and methodologies, and led to an extremely productive and stimulating
discussion of fundamental questions about the nature of Christian conversion.

The
colloquium began with a session on burial evidence and problems of
interpretation. Elizabeth O’Brien considered
the variety of burial practices in early Christian Ireland, focusing in
particular on the practice of inserting burials into ‘ferta’. She stressed that this could be read as a
political rather than a religious statement, as it provided a means by which important
people and newcomers could be incorporated into the existing landscape. Adrián Maldonado provided a fascinatingly
nuanced discussion of Pictish barrow types, highlighting regional differences and
also pointing out the difficulty in identifying the influence of Christianity
itself with certainty.

In
the second session of the morning, Tomás Ó Carragáin and Morten Søvsø spoke
on the difficulties involved in identifying ecclesiastical landscapes. Tomás Ó Carragáin examined the problem of how scholars can quantify
the density of churches in the landscape in relation to secular sites, pointing
out methodological problems that may significantly skew the broad pattern. Morten Søvsø spoke
on recent and ongoing excavations at the church-site in Ribe, likely the oldest
church in Denmark, which have important implications for our understanding of
the history of the church in Viking-Age Denmark.

Friday
afternoon Nancy Edwards led a freezing, but fascinating, excursion to view
inscribed stones on Anglesey. Moving
through the southwestern part of the island, we took a chronological tour of
the development of these inscriptions.

Our
discussion of stone monuments continued as the subject of the opening session
of the second day of the colloquium. Meggen
Gondek discussed the distribution of the different classes of Pictish symbol
stones, focusing in particular on a series of sites in Aberdeenshire,
demonstrating what they can reveal as evidence of changing religious
practice. Cecilia Ljung then examined a
phase of early Christian stone grave monuments in Sweden, dated to a very
limited period in the 11th century. She considered their relationship to the already significant runic
memorial tradition and using Västergötland and Øland as case studies, stressed
regional differences in the nature of the church and conversion.

The
next session, on technology as a tool of conversion, looked at the way that the
conversion affected agricultural organisation and production. Thomas McErlean described the revolutionary
changes that accompanied the introduction of mechanical mills at Nendrum, as
well as improvements to the exploitation of fishing, forest clearing, and
agricultural organisation that monasteries brought. Gabor Thomas then looked at the relationship
between monastic foundations and intensification of rural production in Kent,
taking the case study of Lyminge: a monastery which is currently the subject of
a major interedisciplinary research project.

Rory
Naismith continued the theme of technology and economic impact through
examination of monetization in relation to Christianization. He examined a
series of areas across northern Europe, in each of which coinage enjoyed a
different relationship with religious development. Finally, Lesley Abrams
closed the colloquium’s papers with a review of the fascinating question of
when and how the Vikings of Dublin converted to Christianity. Several important
questions emerged of how conversion is to be defined and contextualized, which
led effectively into the closing discussion.

The
colloquium ended with a lively roundtable discussion of questions such as: is
it possible to distinguish belief from the institution of
the Church in the surviving evidence? What is the minimum requirement to
identify as Christian and how did missionaries perceive their goals? And to
what extent did economic change follow ideology?

The
Network now looks forward to our final colloquium to be held in Cambridge on
the 19th–21st of September 2013. The subject will be ‘The Isles and the Wider
World’ and confirmed speakers include Rowan Williams, Bernhard Maier, Chris
Wickham, James Palmer, Sven Meeder, Ingrid Rembold, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry,
Jörn Staecker, Stanislaw Rosik, Jean-Michel Picard, Sébastian Bully, Krisztina
Szilagyi, and Tomas Sundnes Dronen. A full programme will shortly be available
from our website here,
along with registration information.

About Me

This blog is written and maintained by members of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge. We study the history, languages, literatures and material culture of medieval Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia.
For more information about us go to: http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk